'What allure does topless skydiving hold?' 'Possibly flapping ... with the right cup size.' by Kara
Saturday, June 3, 2006 at 10:19 AM

I found myself unable to sleep in this morning. Not because I have things to do (which I do), but because I just plain couldn't. Well, that means a nap later.

Since I'm not entirely sure what to rant about today -- I honestly have nothing of late -- I figured I'd go over Photoshop techniques for The Flashback. Hell, might'z well share the wealth.

The only thing I fill with the Paint Bucket command is the evil blob. Those are also the only solid lines I draw for these. The rest, I skim over with different-coloured brushes on Multiply. (This is also where I put the foggy edges on the blob.) It doesn't matter what colours, honestly, but I use the 'right' ones anyway. Prophet's hair is teal, if anyone cares. Anything that's supposed to be in colour (eyes, random stuff later) gets left off.

Discard the colour information (transfer to Grayscale, then back to RGB). Then under Image -- Color Balance, I take the Yellow slider bar to about -70 and the red to about +50, give or take. That's a pretty decent sepia tone. And now you can put any coloured bits on.

Now here's the important bit, and I wait 'til I've cut up the panels to do each individually, else it takes forever and doesn't look entirely right. Flip the image horizontally, then type across it in a dark brown. Preferably dark enough that it's readable against the image (except for any really dark spots you may have). If you have a scripty font, all the better. I use Ale and Wenches, which is also the font the blob is speaking in. But it can be anything, even one of those obnoxious fonts you can't bloody read.

Type across the full image. Whatever you want. It really doesn't matter. Rasterize the type (which you should do anyway ... I don't know what it does except make it so I can do things to it), and make sure your two selected colours are the font colour and either white or the lightest sepia on your image. Then run the filter Artistic -- Sponge. How spongey you get is up to you, but I tend to go with the default. This weathers the text. Now take the Layer transparency (seeing as text is a separate layer, right?) and take it down. I put it to about 25. Flip the image back horizontally, and there you have it. A letter opener. A weird used-parchment image.

Go use it on your little LiveJournal icons. Along with the goddamned wax splatters and blending and mini-movies and Evanescence lyrics you crazy teenyboppers love so much.

If you have been, feed me.